This is an area where China-based firms may dominate. Two reasons: First, cost (as always when thinking about China). Second, it isn’t just about AJAX, but really about understanding the underlying hardware limitations. Most firms don’t get this; in China, we get this.

For example, our firm designs AdvancedTCA boards and systems. This is the next generation of data communications, where a lot of the sex and sizzle is, but ask the average software industry or web design firm exec what it is and they’d be clueless. They can tell you that their laptop runs on AMD or Intel, but they’d be much less likely to know which core processors are running their iPhone, Treo or Blackberry.

But in the embedded systems sector, hardware limitations are a pain-in-the-butt. How about writing VLIW architecture-friendly code? How about migrating DSP code to FPGAs? No clue what I’m talking about, eh? Well, that is the reality of pervasive computing, ubiquitous computing. The embedded world is VERY different than the enterprise world … but all (or most) things are migrating to embedded platforms.

Something like Bling helps. But to really understand the pervasive ecosystem requires knowing a lot more than what is typically understood by design firms or software vendors.